“That’s what it always is, with a spouse when the other spouse, who is your wife, dies. I don’t know you! I’m along for the ride but I can’t pretend to …” The rest of the sentence is plucked away by white wine.

“Let me tell you a thing,” the Vic says, and then he does: a story about a dog.

She blinks along with it, watching herself fall for him falling for her, and the story, too, she’s falling for, she can tell.

“That’s sad,” she admits when the story’s over, but her mind is straining to rub the fog off the mirror. She doesn’t skip the magazine articles anymore, of course. Of course she has read a bunch of them, the information avalanche if you start to date someone prominent in a field you’re not interested in. Looking him up is like looking up H. G. Wells, or Babe Ruth, or Scarlatti, or the guy who played the brother in that old show everyone loved. She’s found out all sorts of stories.

“Now you tell me something,” the Vic says.

“I’ve heard that story before.”

“What?”

“The dog story. But it wasn’t quite the same. When I read it, you were on the beach, not in the Grove.”

“They got it wrong.”

“Or you told it wrong, I bet.”

“Padgett.”

“You did.” Her astonishment restabilizes her a little, like a bolt of something strong. “I was going to tell you a high school thing, something real, and you tell me this dog bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit.”

“It is total bullshit.”

“No.”

“Did it happen at the beach or in the woods?”

“The woods.” The Vic takes a curve, high over the spray of the Pacific. “They were taking a picture of me. And the picture was on the beach. So I just said that it happened on the beach, but the story is true.”

Padgett shoves him, slaphappy. “You changed it. The poor dog.”

“You’re sharp,” the Vic says, “spotting that.”

She lazes a foot up onto the expensive dashboard, just to watch him check his frown. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning, I like you. I really do, Padgett. We could be, together, very good. I keep trying to say it, but—”

“—but I keep only half-believing you. Why? Why do you take me with you?”

“I can be vulnerable with you,” he says, staring straight out the windshield.

“You were trying to con me,” Padgett tells him.

“What?”

“That story.”

“No. I altered the truth of a story, OK, but that was just for the publicity.”

“That’s the same thing. What did your wife think when you pulled stuff like that?”

The Vic’s face tenses up and then shrugs down. “It was Maureen’s idea, actually. But you tell me something now.”

“Some bullshit story? OK. I wrote this song.”